by Lindsay Pietroluongo
If you’re in need of reputation builder services for your personal or professional life, contact NetReputation today.
Your customers dictate how well your business performs.
Without delivering an excellent customer experience and getting great feedback in return, your business — and future — can suffer.
The 2021 PowerReviews Ever-Growing Power of Reviews report, which surveyed over 6,500 U.S. consumers, found that 98% of consumers consider reviews to be essential when making a purchase decision. Moreover, when it comes to purchase decisions, ratings and reviews are more important than free shipping offers, price, and recommendations from friends and family.
More important than recommendations from friends and family!
That means that your current customers are more influential than a potential customer’s personal relationships in regard to buying decisions.
Source: PowerReviews
When you make the customer the backbone of your business, you’ll have a much better chance of developing an excellent online reputation that you can use as a strong foundation for your business.
Reputation Builder = Business Builder
There are several business benefits of using online reputation builder services:
- Build authority and trustworthiness so potential customers feel safe buying from you
- Gain a competitive advantage so customers are most likely to choose your brand
- Improve your customer relationships to encourage customer loyalty and positive word-of-mouth marketing
- Increase brand visibility, which leads to finding more potential customers and converting them
- Open up the door to new collaborations and partnerships that expand your reach
Since building and maintaining a positive online reputation is an ongoing job that requires consistency, consider working with an online reputation management company that can handle a lot of it for you.
What Is a Reputation Builder?
When you hear the term “reputation builder,” it often refers to reputation management software.
Reputation builder software may consolidate customer reviews, capture new online reviews, respond to customer feedback, etc.
For our purposes, though, the term reputation builder refers to the process of reputation management, specifically online reputation management (ORM).
Our reputation builder services help you create a positive online presence so you can attract more customers, improve customer loyalty and grow your business.
Online Reputation Builder Tips and Tricks
Reputation building isn’t a one-time process. It requires consistent, ongoing effort to continually make an impact. Today’s positive online reputation can become stagnant if you don’t continue working for it.
Also, keep this in mind: 71% of consumers care about review recency, most of them looking for business reviews that are no older than a month.
Source: PowerReviews
The more reviews, the better, too — most consumers read between 1 and 10 reviews, and 68% say that the ideal number of product reviews is 26 or more.
Ask for Customer Reviews
Instead of waiting for customers to leave reviews online, give them a gentle nudge. This may even result in more positive reviews for your business.
Sometimes, customers will only take action to leave a review if they’ve had a bad experience. By reminding them that they can give you feedback when they’ve had a good experience too, you may see more positive reviews coming in than usual.
With automated email or SMS marketing, you can send branded requests for feedback that make it easy for customers to leave reviews. And make sure to ask for an actual review, not just a star rating. More than 50% of consumers don’t trust star-only ratings; the true power lies in the actual review.
Pro Tip: Make sure your contact information is included in the email or SMS request. If a customer has a bad experience, they may take the opportunity to contact you directly for a solution. This is a much better outcome than having them leave a negative review.
Monitor Your Online Reviews
Monitor review sites (Better Business Bureau, Facebook, Google, etc.) for mentions of your name and business name. If possible, set up email notifications so you’ll be notified whenever your brand is mentioned.
According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2023, Google is the No. 1 trusted platform for all industries. Other trusted review sites include the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Tripadvisor and Yelp. In addition to review sites, consumers also head to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for information about businesses.
Monitoring review sites is an important online reputation builder step because you need to be aware of what customers are saying now instead of finding out when it’s too late.
Respond to Customer Feedback
It’s smart to respond to all types of customer feedback, positive and negative. However, responding to negative reviews is more pressing because if you wait too long, you’ll miss the chance to smooth out the problem.
Not only can responding to a negative review help you one-on-one with the customer, but it will show others that you care about customer service, that you’re listening to what people are saying and that you’ll take the time to discuss the issue.
To reiterate this point, don’t assume that your response to a negative review will only be seen by the person who posted it. Consumers purposely seek out negative reviews, and they’ll also notice if the business responds to them.
Remember to be professional and respectful when responding, even if the customer is being rude or not telling the truth. This is an exercise in protecting your company’s online reputation, not in proving who’s right. There are ways to defend your business and set the record straight without resorting to derogatory language.
Send Surveys
Once you have customer contact information, you can reach out to ask them for feedback beyond reviews. Consider sending surveys that ask about their interests, what they want more of, their pain points, etc.
Here are a few survey questions to get you started, and you can adapt each survey based on your goals and the customer’s history with your brand:
- How satisfied are you with [product or service]?
- Which features of the [product/service] are most valuable to you?
- If you could change something about [brand], what would it be?
- Were you able to find what you wanted on our website?
- What made you choose our brand over a competitor?
For more survey ideas, check out this article.
Use Customer Feedback in Your Marketing
When you have excellent reviews, examples of customer satisfaction and interesting customer insights, you can use them to support your marketing efforts. For example:
- Add a customer review widget to your website’s homepage. (79% of consumers look for websites with product reviews.)
- Create a case study blog post that shows how your product or service helped a customer reach their goals.
- Include product-specific reviews in your newsletters that promote that product.
- Post customer testimonials to your social media accounts.
- Send a press release about a brand or product change you made based on customer feedback.
Social proof can work wonders for your marketing. Plus, user-generated content (UGC) is much less labor-intensive to create, freeing you up for other types of content creation. It also improves your search engine optimization (SEO) and search rankings naturally.
Even More Reputation Builder Strategies
In addition to gathering reviews and using them to improve the customer experience as well as sentiment about your business, here are other reputation builder strategies to add to the mix:
- Branding so that your business is recognizable
- Content marketing to have neutral and positive brand content rank highly in search results
- Online reputation repair if you need to remove or suppress negative content
- Public relations efforts to get coverage from popular news and industry outlets
- SEO strategies to increase website visibility and traffic
- Social media management to reach audiences on different platforms
- Web design that prioritizes the user experience (UX) and customer satisfaction
This can be a lot to handle on your own, and some of these strategies require specific knowledge or tools to carry them out effectively.
Contact Us for Online Reputation Builder Services Today!
So much of your business power lies with your customers. When you leverage your audience, you’ll find effective ways to market and grow your brand.
Not only will you be able to build a solid online reputation that attracts more customers, but you’ll have an easier time maintaining that reputation once you’ve achieved it. Reap the benefits of a continuous cycle of listening to your customers, making them happy and improving your online reputation.
Contact NetReputation today at 844-461-3632 or by filling out this form. We’re excited to discuss your unique situation and explain what our online reputation builder process can do for you.